Etherington Creek is probably the quietest and darkest place I’ve ever camped. No trains chugging by during the night with horns blasting, no raging rivers, just complete silence. A bit unnerving at times, as the campground is in bear country. And darkness. There were no lights whatsoever other than the lanterns we brought. By Saturday night, the sky had clouded over along with smoke from nearby forest fires settling in, so there were not even stars visible. And no cellular service either… For the entire weekend. Definitely not what I’m used to. This was a true get-a-way. And it was B-E-A-UTIFUL!!
The provincial park and campground isn’t far away, about a 90 min drive from the south end of Calgary:
The entrance to our part of the campground, yes the sky was a sunny blue the day I arrived!
My standard campsite setup: Truck tent and morning coffee station. I went camping with friends! We had 5 campsites reserved all in a row, 9 humans in total and we conglomerated at one campsite for eating and hanging out. The one site was so big that all of us probably could have camped on it if it was allowed.
Some of the scenery for our Saturday hike. Yes I was armed with bear spray and a couple others had bear bells jangling away.
And what is a bit of camping without finding a geocache? Yes spoiler alert, pictures of the cache. Complete with a pic of Murky the geocaching murloc! This cache was actually at the campground. There were other ones around, but a bit of distance away and while I did have all the nearby caches saved for offline use on my phone and GPS device, apparently I need trail maps or something because there were not a lot of obvious trails around, mostly makeshift ones in the area. Maybe there are no trail maps for the area, who knows. If we were to beeline from one cache to another, the terrain would have been a bit rough! The nearest caches from the campground were 1-2 km away and I kept wondering, ‘Well how do we get to it in the most efficient way?’ Unless I missed the point and they are supposed to be hard to get to!
So lesson learned: Preload/save maps of any existing trails in remote areas I plan to visit. One real cool thing I noticed with my GPS device since I’m still learning how to use it, it always knew where we were and it actually marked the route we were hiking, automatically without me having to set anything up. Despite the lack of marked trails, I think it would have been pretty hard to get lost!
And here we have some pictures of the actual Etherington Creek. Yup, just a creek! No raging river here. It is summer though, maybe dried up a bit, or maybe not. Guessing it completely freezes over during winter.
And after a day of hiking, the great chili cookoff!! Well not really a cookoff, it was the mushroom pot versus the no mushroom pot, HA! And I wasn’t the only one dipping into the no mushroom pot either.
All in all a successful and very remote weekend of camping, might just be the last one of the season before winter sets in. Glad I got out one last time!
